Mistakenly, many nurses, nursing managers and other professionals associate their scope of practice to the tasks they accomplish in their work day. However, exercising the full scope of nursing practice is related to the use of one’s abilities demonstrating a high level of knowledge and judgment tinged by skills, training and experience across the field of practice (D’Amour et al., 2012). This paper, which specifically targets primary care nursing managers, is a tool for primary care nursing managers aimed at understanding and defining the scope of nursing practice to better implement changes in organizational contexts and optimize this said practice.
The scoping review analysis of articles revealed the findings that the expected role of the primary care nurse technician is to work with the client and his family in his care process while the expected role of the nurse clinician is not only to intervene in the client/family care process but to contribute to the advancement of the practice, whether it is for the creation of partnerships, professional development of nursing staff or research. This analysis also showed an important distinction between the expected role and the role behavior. Indeed, the role behavior reflects the suboptimal use of both the nurse technician and the nurse clinician who are, among others, assigned to tasks that require none of their professional skills.
Training, decision making mechanisms, practice environment and collaboration certainly have an influence on the scope of nursing practice in primary care. Nevertheless, through changes operated by primary care nursing managers, optimizing the scope of nursing practice is mission impossible. By adopting a transformational leadership, educating the manager to the concept of optimal scope of practice and introducing the role of case manager for the nurse clinician, both the roles of the nurse and the nurse clinician in primary care can be clearly defined